Alexandria: Former Air Force Intelligence Analyst was sentenced to 45 months in prison on Tuesday because it leaked confidential information about the US government drone strike program to a journalist.
Daniel Hale of Nashville, Tennessee, said he was motivated by guilt when he revealed detailed reporter investigations from the military drone program which he believed indiscriminately planted civilians in Afghanistan far from the battlefield.
In issuing the sentence, US district judge Liam O’Grady quoted the need to prevent others from revealing the government’s secrets and notifying Hale that he had other choices besides sharing confidential information with a reporter.
The prosecution was one in a series of cases of the Ministry of Justice had been brought in recent years against current government officials and former governments that had revealed secrets classified with journalists.
As in the case of other leaks, the arguments are a little more about whether Hale has joint information illegally – it openly admits it has done it – and more about whether the action is detrimental to national security and the extent to which the motives must be positioned.
Prosecutors argue that Hale, which was deployed to Afghanistan in August 2012 and was respected less than a year later, harassed the government’s trust and knew the documents he shared “risked seriously, and in the damage to the national.
Security ‘but but it leaked them.
Prosecutors said documents -Dokumen leaked by Hale found in compilation of internet material designed to help Islamic state fighters avoid detection.
“(a) SA results from Hale’s actions, the most ferocious terrorists in the world obtained by documents classified by the United States as” secrets’ and “Secrets’ and” Secrets’ and “Secret” Top ” – and think that these documents are valuable enough to disseminate to their own followers in their own manual, “prosecutors’ demanded.
An analyst at the intelligence signal, Hale’s work when he was deployed to Afghanistan requires the target placement for drone strikes and tracks cellphone signals related to people who are believed to be enemy fighters.
After leaving the Air Force, Hale – feeling guilty of his role and believing that he could make a difference in how targeted the strike was carried out – shared with a journalist he had previously met a document that showed the drone program was not in accordance with the government claimed to avoid civil death.
He described in the 11 pages of the horror prison letter he said he felt when he watched the video of Afghan civilians killed in part because of the work he had done to help track them.
“Not everyday passed that I did not question the justification for my actions, ” Hale wrote.
His lawyers argue in court letters that their altruistic motifs, and the fact that the government has not shown the actual damage that occurs from leakage, must be taken into account for a mild sentence.
“He committed a violation to bring attention to what he believed as an immoral government behavior carried out under the robe of secrecy and contrary to the public statement about President Obama regarding the alleged president of the United States Military Drone program,” they wrote.